Nine nights, three bases, no hire car: reserve a Transylvania trip with a driver

The hire car is the first part to go

Three parts of the house shape are broken here and the hire car is the one you notice first. In its place is a local driver with a nine seat van, agreed a day at a time and parked in the yard when nobody wants him. The single base goes too, replaced by three of them at three nights each. And there are six of you rather than two, which is not an accident of who signed up: a driver is a fixed daily cost, and dividing it by six is what puts this within reach at all. Nine nights rather than eight, because two changeover mornings swallow the better part of two days. The first run from the airport is about three hours, not two. From $3,060 a head where the house shape is $2,340. The ground it buys you is the Saxon country of southern Transylvania, loosely the triangle between Sibiu, Mediaș and Sighișoara, where German speaking farmers built roughly 150 fortified churches into villages of 300 houses and then, after 1989, nearly all of them left inside five years.

Two valleys with no straight road between them

One base does not work here, and the reason is a map rather than a preference. The villages sit in two systems that do not talk to each other. The Hârtibaciu valley holds Alma Vii, Richiș, Biertan and Mălâncrav; the Târnava Mare plateau, thirty kilometres north east, holds Saschiz, Cloașterf, Criț, Meșendorf and Viscri. Between them runs a ridge with an unsurfaced track over it, eighteen kilometres and impassable to a van for two or three days after heavy rain. Going round on tarmac is sixty five kilometres and an hour and a half. Base yourself in one valley and you spend two hours a day getting to the other and two hours getting back. So: three nights in the Hârtibaciu, three on the plateau near Saschiz, three at the western end where Cisnădie, Cisnădioara and Câlnic sit within an hour of each other and Sibiu is twenty minutes off. Two changeover mornings, bags in the hall by ten, and the driver does the moving.

What a day here is actually made of

Mornings are slow because the houses want them to be. Breakfast is at eight or half past, cooked, sat down to, and it is the same six of you every day. The driving is real but modest: forty to ninety minutes, on county roads with a surface that alternates between decent tarmac and patched gravel, behind carts at ten kilometres an hour with no chance of passing for a mile. Two churches is a full day. Three is a day nobody enjoys. Lunch is a problem you solve rather than a thing that happens, because villages of 400 people have no restaurant; the houses will make a parcel if you ask the night before, and there is a shop in Saschiz and one in Biertan. Afternoons tend to be walking, an hour or two on the plateau above Sighișoara or on the old orchard terraces. You are back by six because dinner is at seven and there is one sitting. At dusk the cattle come up the village street to their own gates, which takes about twenty minutes and blocks everything, and after that the village is dark and quiet in a way that people either sleep extremely well in or find long.

The churches are locked and somebody has the key

Every fortified church in this region is locked, and it is not personal. A custodian in the village holds the key, and the arrangement is that you knock at a house, somebody comes out drying their hands, walks over with you and unlocks. Entry is ten to fifteen lei a head, cash, two or three dollars. The posted hours, where hours are posted at all, mean ten to one and three to six, and they hold about as often as they do not; several of the smaller churches open only when a person turns up. The driver rings ahead the evening before, which converts most of it from luck into an appointment. What is inside varies more than the outside suggests: whitewash and painted box pews at one, a ring wall with a rampart walk at another, at Viscri and elsewhere the lofts inside the walls where each household kept its bacon under lock through the winter. Seven of these churches carry a world heritage listing and get coach parties; the other 140 odd do not, and stand in yards with the grass cut by somebody's sheep.

Six people, and what six does to a house

Six is not just a bigger number, it changes what you are staying in. A restored Saxon house that has been turned over to guests usually has four to six rooms, so six of you take most of it, and at two of the three bases you will have the whole house, the kitchen and the courtyard. At the third you are split between two houses about 200 metres apart, eating in one of them. The kitchen cooks one menu at one hour, which is fine unless somebody expected a choice, and dietary requirements need saying in writing weeks out rather than at the table. The genuine difficulty of six is not accommodation. It is that six adults have to agree on a departure time every morning, and the driver is standing there at nine whether that has happened or not. Parties who already travel together handle it. Parties assembled for the occasion sometimes discover things about each other.

Who this suits, and who should leave it alone

This suits six people who already know each other's habits, two generations of a family often, and anybody who has decided they do not want to drive unlit county roads at night, which is a sound decision in a country where carts and bicycles are on those roads after dark without lights. It suits people who like a day with three or four fixed points and gaps between them. It does not suit two of you; the figure only works divided six ways, and the office will say so rather than take the booking. It does not suit anybody who wants to change their mind at eleven in the morning, because the driver's day is agreed the night before and he has his own hours. And it does not suit anybody who cannot manage cobbles, uneven churchyards, ladder stairs into towers and interiors that sit at twelve degrees in May: none of these buildings has been softened for visitors, and none of them will be.

Awkward questions about this change

Do you book our flights to Romania?

No. This office puts nothing in the air and holds a contract with no carrier, so the flights are yours, booked in your own name on whatever routing six people can actually get. What the office does is work backwards from them. Give it the airport and the arrival hour and the driver, the first night and the order of the three bases are built around that. Cluj and Sibiu both work; from Cluj the first run is around three hours, from Sibiu it is closer to ninety minutes and the price does not change. If your six arrive on two separate connections some hours apart, say so early, because that rearranges the first day.

Can you promise the churches will be open when we arrive?

No, and nobody honest will. The key sits with a person who has a life, and there are days when the person is at a funeral in the next village and the church stays shut. What can be done is done: the driver telephones the custodian the previous evening for every church on the list, which turns most of it into an appointment, and the day is built with more churches on it than you will use so that one closure costs you nothing. Expect one or two shut over nine days. Two of the nine will also be closed for a wedding or a service, which you are welcome to stand at the back of.

Could we drop the driver and take two hire cars?

Yes, and here is what actually changes. Two cars for six people means a convoy, a navigator in each, and one of the two arriving twenty minutes later every single time. You gain the evenings: with your own keys you can drive to Sighișoara for dinner instead of eating in the house at seven. You lose the night roads, or rather you take them on, unlit, shared with carts, and with village dogs that come off the verge. Parking in the lanes is tight against gates that people need to open. The figure moves down; the office will put the new one in writing before you decide anything, and it will not tell you which version is the better week, because that depends on things it does not know about you.

Can the six of us be under one roof every night?

At two of the three, yes, and the whole house is yours including the kitchen and the yard. At the third it is two houses about 200 metres apart, three and three, with dinner and breakfast in one of them. This is a supply problem rather than a policy: the plateau villages have very few houses with six rooms, and the ones that exist are often taken a year ahead for the September weeks. If one roof for all nine nights matters more than the villages you end up in, say so at the start and the itinerary gets rebuilt around houses rather than around churches, which changes the shape again and the price with it.

Could we do this in July instead?

You can, and the office will arrange it, but hear what July is first. The valleys run at 30 to 33 degrees by early afternoon and the houses are thick walled and cool, so the day inverts: out early, indoors from one until five. The hay is being cut, which means machinery on the lanes and the smell of it everywhere. The listed churches carry coach parties between eleven and three. Houses charge their high season rate and the figure goes up by roughly a fifth. Thunderstorms build over the hills most afternoons in the first half of the month and can drop 30 millimetres in an hour, which is what closes the ridge track.